Photograph: Courtesy Quiguang Li and Wei Xuįor this story, I spoke to a dozen gay Chinese men who have begun or completed surrogacy in the United States. Qiguang Li and Wei Xu arrive at Los Angeles International Airport on their first trip to the US, in 2015. Because gay couples are not allowed to marry or adopt in China, they started thinking about surrogacy. By 2014 they owned two properties together and had just started a small business, a dry cleaners in Shanghai. They’d chatted online and had a few phone calls, but when they met in person, it was love at first sight. They had both grown up in rural China before moving to big cities. Xu and Li met in Shanghai on 15 November 2007. Like Li and Xu, many of them refer to their surrogacy process as their “journey”. They traveled nearly 50,000 miles, spent more than $200,000, and went through countless days of distress, all to fulfill the dream of having their own family.Īn increasing number of Chinese gay men, like Li and Xu, are traveling thousands of miles and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to pursue a dream that is impossible at home. Li and Xu, a gay couple who have been together since 2007, would walk out of the airport, get married two days later in Los Angeles, and, more important, start their journey toward parenthood.įrom 2015 to 2018, Li and Xu made four transpacific trips as part of their gestational surrogacy processes. There were a few other things they didn’t mention to the CBP officers. The unexpected incident was the prelude to a carefully planned trip into another country where their sexuality was much more accepted than at home. “But we felt kind of ashamed to say that,” he recalls.
Xu learned that if they had said they were partners from the beginning, they would have been allowed to go through border control together, avoiding all the drama. Xu kept explaining that they were very close friends, until at one point the officer asked: “Are you two partners?”Īnd then everything changed.
An officer asked them why one’s documents were in the hands of the other. In the secondary screening room – commonly referred to by Chinese travelers as the “small dark room” – Xu and Li waited almost three hours, believing that they would be denied entry.